Sophie Farrah pulls up a chair at Simon Rogan’s chef’s table experience in the heart of Soho...
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Soho was heaving, as it usually is. But as I rounded the corner into St Anne’s Court, just off Dean Street, a sense of calm settled. Here, hidden away in the heart of central London, sits Aulis, a tiny twelve-seater chef’s table experience from Simon Rogan, a pioneer of the farm-to-fork ethos.
Rogan is internationally acclaimed for his hyper-seasonal cooking and inventive tasting menus that famously unfold in the Lake District, where he owns several restaurants, including the three Michelin-starred L’Enclume, and his own farm, Our Farm.
Aulis is his London outpost and earned its own Michelin star in 2024. Here, produce straight from the farm is transformed with meticulous care and immense skill. With only twelve guests at each service, it offers a dynamic, intimate and fully interactive dining experience in which dishes are cooked before you and explained at every stage.
It may be Rogan’s name on the front door, but it is charming head chef Charlie Tayler (pictured below) who runs the show at Aulis. And what a show it is.
Cristian Barnett
Aulis head chef Charlie Tayler
We were greeted at the door by Charlie himself and shown to a comfortable table in the small, intimate lounge, where guests all gather before sitting down to eat. Chic leather sofas are covered in tactile wool throws, and pictures of Our Farm’s abundant veg patches adorn the walls; it is sleek and modern but has a cosy softness to it.
Charismatic beverage manager Charles promptly swooped in with a bottle of Rogan’s collaboration with Sussex vineyard Wiston, a crisp sparkling rosé served in wonderfully elegant glasses.
Aulis lounge
My very first taste was a perfect demonstration of this extraordinary effort. A single croustade arrived, black in colour thanks to activated charcoal made from waste charcoal from the grill, and filled with salt baked kohlrabi.
At the bottom was a sweet, tangy cucumber jam, while the top was finished with tiny nasturtium leaves picked on the farm the day before, given a spritz of pickle juice that left them with a delightful dewy sheen. Even the kohlrabi skin had been given purpose, dehydrated and used to form the croustade itself.
The final flourish was a drizzle of oyster emulsion for a gentle, creamy saltiness. As I have an oyster allergy, my version instead used oyster leaf, a plant that grows on Our Farm and shares the mollusc’s distinct flavour. All this work for one exceptional, unforgettable mouthful that offered so many flavours and textures it felt almost poetic. I could have left there and then and been happy.
Cristian Barnett
Every single dish that followed was a product of the same immense skill, painstaking process and attention to detail. Still sat comfortably in the lounge, we enjoyed a stream of perfectly executed morsels and flavour-packed mouthfuls, each one delivered with friendly enthusiasm by the dexterous team, who seemed just as thrilled to share each course as I was to eat it.
A vividly pinky-purple bowl of aerated, salt-baked Boltardy beetroot came balanced with juicy blackberry and chunks of meaty smoked eel, the trimmings of which had been used to make a salty emulsion.
A smooth, saline seaweed custard topped with a girolle laden broth was deeply comforting, and I won’t forget the truffle pudding in a hurry: a bite-sized wedge of croissant slices compressed in truffle custard, caramelised in birch sap (sustainably harvested by Rogan’s team), and then finished with a thick layer of grated Corra Linn cheese and a drizzle of pine oil. I could have eaten ten.
Cristian Barnett
Soon it was time to take our seats at the striking chef’s table, a sweeping semi-circular bar where twelve guests sit facing the action of the small galley-style kitchen. What a thrill it was to watch each course expertly grilled, fried, blow-torched and more by Charlie and his team, before being precisely assembled and warmly presented.
Sommelier Charles ran the wine flight with effortless ease. Much like the food, it was a carefully curated selection of elegant, interesting and delicious bottles from around the world. But, somewhat unexpectedly, it was his non-alcoholic pairing that proved the real revelation. This was a mind-boggling exploration of booze free alternatives that had clearly received the same level of creativity and technical precision as the dishes themselves.
Charles’s approach is inventive and almost scientific: one pairing was made from discarded artichoke skins, lacto fermented, then refermented into a Hojicha tea kombucha and finished with a cloud-like goat’s milk and woodruff cream. Another used leftover cabbage leaves from the paired dish, roasted and then turned into a syrup, mixed with a gently carbonated soda water.
The ‘Red Wine Not Red Wine’ was another surprising pleasure, made from Japanese black tea cooked with careful amounts of beetroot juice, unfermented red grape juice, cocoa nibs and blackberries, then finished with blackcurrant wood from the farm. Where some ‘nolo’ pairings feel like a compromise, this felt like quite the opposite.
Cristian Barnett
In the kitchen, textures abounded. Paper-thin slices of raw, buttery soft Orkney scallop were layered with a subtly floral pineapple weed jelly and doused in a silky buttermilk sauce dotted with smoked pike perch roe. It was elegant, moreish and beautiful to eat.
Then came pure indulgence: Jerusalem artichoke and soft pickled Lisbon onions nestled in small concrete dishes, smothered in a Ragstone cheese sauce and blowtorched until the surface shimmered with a crisp, caramelised sheen.
Throughout, Charlie and his team — Ben, Lauren, Charles and Milly — moved around the intimate space with calm, almost choreographed ease. The atmosphere was informal and quietly animated, with easy conversation flowing between chefs and diners. Questions were welcome, and each course was introduced with a friendly, relaxed clarity. It felt less like a traditional Michelin-starred setting and more like being welcomed into a friend’s home for a long, leisurely lunch.
The kitchen’s dedication to avoiding waste and championing British ingredients is paramount and impressively obsessive. There is no Champagne on the menu; instead, a carefully chosen selection of the very best English sparklings. A teriyaki-style sauce is made by cooking and fermenting English pearl barley, then blackening it through a further five-to-six-week fermentation to draw out deep, sweet umami notes. A creamy taramasalata is created using the roe from the fish course, salted and smoked in-house. Even the leftover beeswax from the honey served with the cheese course is given a new purpose, transformed into candles.
Aulis plating up
Between grilling dill-brined hispi cabbage — later served with pickled shimeji mushrooms, the aforementioned ‘teriyaki’, Wiltshire truffle purée and a creamy English wasabi sauce — and wielding a samurai-esque blade to slice through venison as if it were butter, Charlie mentions that he spent time honing his craft in Japan, and you can tell; his precision is astounding.
The fish course was John Dory, fresh from Newlyn Harbour and ever so gently cooked in brown butter, leaving it firm and meaty. It was served with a subtle ‘taramasalata’, sweet courgette purée and wonderfully juicy New Zealand spinach grown on the farm. The sauce, made from the roasted bones of the fish, enriched with chicken fat and lovage oil, was delectably rich and sticky.
Cristian Barnett
Before plating up the cheese course, Charlie turned his attention to dessert and petits fours, cooking a roasted juniper-infused fudge centre stage and piping it into small tartlets to set just so.
What followed was a dish I have no qualms in declaring to be one of the most spectacular things I have ever had the pleasure of eating. Charlie created it five years ago, and it endures for good reason. I watched as scoops of Tunworth cheese ice cream — the thickest, creamiest imaginable — were nestled into dishes and drizzled with borage and truffle honey, cobnut oil made from preserved cobnuts from the farm, and finished with delicate shards of spelt grain cracker. It was both a taste and a texture sensation.
Aulis fudge and Kendall mint
A ‘Kendall mint cake’ — a cool to the touch creamy mint ice cream imaginatively shaped like a smooth pebble — provided an apt ending to a truly extraordinary meal, served alongside the fudge tartlet, now a thick, sweet, creamy mouthful, still warm, and perfectly not quite set.
Given its size and the simple fact that it is, quite frankly, fantastic, Aulis books up fast. If it’s going on your 2026 wish list (and it absolutely should), make sure you plan well ahead. At £195, the tasting menu is undeniably an investment, but every exceptional mouthful and immaculate moment makes it worth every penny.
And as for that Tunworth ice cream...I suspect I will be thinking about it for years.
Book now at aulis.co.uk/aulis-london
